Vinod Khosla: College Degrees Are Becoming Useless | People by WTF | Episode 12

**Nikhil Kamath** (0:30)
You seem like a very certain person. You take the contrarian opinion in a very certain manner.

**Vinod Khosla** (0:36)
Almost certainly, with no doubt, there isn't a job where AI won't be able to do 80% of 80% of all jobs. And that's what today's 20 or 22 year old has to take for granted.

**Nikhil Kamath** (1:10)
Hi Vinod, thank you for doing this. For our audience in India, which are largely entrepreneurs or going to be entrepreneurs, I don't want to introduce you. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about your life. Your story is very well known, so I don't have to rehash it for them. But maybe you tell us a bit about life, how you began and where you are today.

**Vinod Khosla** (1:34)
Well, you know, life, my life has been pretty simple. I haven't done too many things, too many different things. But I was always curious about technology and the piece people don't understand is, or don't know, I would say, there's nothing to understand. Do you want me to stop when there's a sound overhead or keep going?

**Nikhil Kamath** (2:04)
Is it okay?

**Vinod Khosla** (2:05)
Yeah.

**Nikhil Kamath** (2:06)
It's okay.

**Vinod Khosla** (2:07)
Okay.

**Nikhil Kamath** (2:08)
It makes it more natural.

**Vinod Khosla** (2:09)
Okay. Yeah. Sometimes people do and sometimes people don't.

**Nikhil Kamath** (2:14)
Right. Do you do a lot of these interviews?

**Vinod Khosla** (2:16)
I do a fair number. Yeah. When I was 16, I'd go from Delhi, Cantonment, where I lived, to Old Delhi to rent old magazines. That's how you got access to information. There was no place to go to get access to magazines or others unless you could afford to buy them, and we couldn't.
But I used to get old issues of technology magazines, especially the Electronic Engineering Times, to see what was going on. I read about Andy Grove as a Hungarian immigrant coming and starting a company here. That's what fascinated me and got me interested in, why can't I start a technology company? I had very little interest and still have very little interest in business. I do it because it needs to be done, but I mostly am interested in technology and the impact it can have. So I got enamored by this guy. All I knew about Hungary was they had great stamps. So if you collected stamps, back then you always wanted Hungarian stamps. But I followed his story.

**Nikhil Kamath** (3:37)
Why did you want Hungarian stamps?

**Vinod Khosla** (3:40)
I used to collect stamps as a kid. There wasn't like 16 things to do. There was no Internet, there was no libraries you had access to, there was not a lot of magazines. There wasn't much to read or get information from. So you had hobbies like stamp collecting or coin collecting, or I couldn't afford vintage car collecting, which some people did, but I worked on cars like that. But, so there wasn't a whole lot to do. And I used to read these magazines by renting them. And usually when the magazine got old in the area, like in the US, they got shipped and you could rent them. So that's what fascinated me, it could be done.
I didn't know anybody in business. I didn't have anybody I knew who was actually in business. So I didn't know what that was like. Neither family nor otherwise.

**Nikhil Kamath** (4:43)
So you did engineering at IIT, and then came to the US for your masters at Carnegie Mellon in biomedical engineering and then business in Stanford. Which part of this academic career formed you or shaped you today?

**Vinod Khosla** (5:01)
You know, I would say every step was about a particular goal. Engineering at IIT was because I was interested in technology, and electrical engineering seemed pretty damn interesting. There was nothing called computer science back then. That was, I joined IIT in 1971
So that was interesting. And then I got curious about biomedical engineering. There wasn't really such a discipline. We did some projects in India in biomedical engineering, but there was no biomedical engineering department anywhere in India. And I got involved with a professor there, Professor Guha, and we did some things between IIT Delhi and All India Institute of Medical Sciences. I was curious, and then I just said, well, masters in biomedical engineering would be cool. And so I came to the US to do my masters. But my real goal was to get to Silicon Valley and start a company.

**Nikhil Kamath** (6:10)
Right.

**Vinod Khosla** (6:11)
And MBA was a necessity just to get to Silicon Valley. Right.

**Nikhil Kamath** (6:17)
So, I have an agenda for today, Vinod. As an investor, the big question I have today is, since everything is changing so quickly with technology changing, I want to figure out which industries, sectors might be most relevant 10 years from now, either to invest it or build a business in. The question is essentially as a young entrepreneur in India, where do the tailwinds really lie and where should I focus my efforts on over the next decade? So a lot of what I'm going to talk to you about today, we'll kind of like focus on that. And from all that I've watched in your interviews, and from the few times I've spoken to you via that common pledge community we are part of, you seem like a very certain person.